Counting... And Being Counted

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

Although often attributed to Albert Einstein, it is unclear who actually said this quote. Regardless of whoever spoke it into existence though, upon reading this quote for the first time, I was struck by it's truth and maybe a little bit of it's almost accusatory manner. You see, most of the science I deal with is quantitative, it can be counted. And even in scenarios where what we're trying to measure cannot be counted, we find a way. Maybe it's indirect experimentation (measuring a different variable in order to arrive at conclusions about that initial, non-quantifiable variable) or deductive reasoning, but one of the notable features for almost all experiments is, "what am I measuring?" Essentially, "what am I counting, and what do those numbers tell me?" As a result, we can sometimes forget that while most things happening in a lab can be counted, most other things cannot. But this doesn't mean that the quantifiable things are the only things worth thinking about or exploring. Surely, you've come to this conclusion far before I began to understand it myself. Life, in and of itself, our daily affairs, are all things constituted by a multitude of variables that make "counting" its value utterly impossible.

Naturally, after pondering the strife of human explorations in earlier posts, I thought about this and asked a few questions. If we're all trying to study life and the way humans operate be it with respect to biology as the substantial concept of life or with respect to human nature in a philosophical sense, why are we always trying to count things? If life, the amalgam of all those little pieces we study is something we cannot quantify, then how much good can quantifying those smaller pieces really do? As you can imagine, asking these questions brought a little trepidation on my part. Quantifying things has constituted quite a large portion of my recent endeavors in the world of neuroscience. Asking such questions then posed the possibility of losing any value I had previously found in such thought. But what I came to find from this first, was that asking a question is taking a risk. It's putting the things you have come to know as truths on the line and conceding that maybe those truths aren't true after all. Lucky for me though, the second thing I learned is that more often than not, the answers to these questions aren't as clear-cut as one may expect. It's important to realize that the question wasn't "Are quantifiable things of any value to exploration?" No, the question was and frankly, still is; "How much value do quantifiable things have?" Surely, an acknowledgement of quantitative studies' limited nature shouldn't cause a complete renunciation of their necessity. Come to think of it, we ought to arrive at the opposite. The process of asking questions shouldn't be to simplify or distill reality to a black and white state. Rather, it would behoove me to claim none other than the fact that asking questions allows us to abound in the knowledge of that which we are thinking upon.

And so, we return to the enigma of counting and being "counted." Based upon my previous few statements I cannot, in any level of confidence, assert that quantifying things through controlled experiments and measuring every inch of a specimen is void of value. At the same time, I cannot and certainly, must not assert that the entirety of our glorious living and breathing beings ought to be confined within the finite system of numbers known to humankind. There are things which can be counted and things which cannot. That is the truth claim at hand. But the crossing over of those two entities should not be cause for their cancellation. They remain independent while in an intermingling of complete interdependence. We can't understand the hormones that cause non quantifiable things like happiness or love or fear without understanding the glands that release them or the blood volume that they produce throughout our anatomical organs and systems. The two, quantity and quality go hand in hand and we must concentrate on each without losing sight of the other's purpose, place, and importance.